This is Zodiac speaking. No, this is Zodiac speaking

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Police sketch of the man suspected of being the Zodiac killer, from 1969.

The saga of the dueling maybe-maybe not Zodiac daughters goes on — and as with all things Zodiac, it is rapidly accumulating layers upon layers.

You may remember that first, Deborah Perez of Orange County proclaimed in April that her stepfather, carpenter Guy Hendrickson, was the infamous — and never captured — slayer who left five people dead in the Bay Area 40 years ago and taunted the police and The Chronicle with cryptic letters claiming gleeful credit

Then came her stepsister, Janice Hendrickson of the Bay Area — she wants to keep her precise whereabouts off-record — who the next day angrily retorted in an exclusive to yours truly that Perez had it all wrong, that her dad was no killer.

Guy Ward Hendrickson and his wife, Helen Hendrickson, in the 1940s. Was he the future Zodiac killer?

Since then, both women have been talking in private to investigators, trying to establish that handwriting samples and other evidence either 1) prove the Hendrickson-Zodiac link (Perez) or 2) knock it down (Janice Hendrickson). So it should be no surprise that this month, when yet another person came forth to say HE talked to the real Zodiac, many years ago and the killer isn’t Hendrickson or any of the other hundreds (probably thousands, actually) of purported Zodiac suspects, but instead a merchant seaman, Janice Hendrickson took great heart.

Hendrickson e-mailed us this week, saying she was grateful for the new story, and said she is still examining documents and the like to disprove her stepsister’s contention.

“The description is so far off from Dad…it is not funny,” Hendrickson wrote.

Perez and her husband and lawyers, in the meantime, are hanging tough with her contention. “This is not easy for me to do — I would much rather not have come out like this, but I just want the truth out there,” she said the last time we talked.

At this point in time, barring a definitive proclamation by the cops somewhere, only one thing is for sure in all this: You can bet on more … and more … and more people to step forward to say someone new is the old Zodiac. Like they’ve been doing, pretty much nonstop, for four decades.